


If We're Good.

by ardberts



Series: We Were Born Sick [2]
Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Eventual Relationships, Eventual Romance, F/M, Love/Hate, Male-Female Friendship, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-09 22:38:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17413859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ardberts/pseuds/ardberts
Summary: "Do not mistake me for my mask. You see light dappling on the water and forget the deep, cold dark beneath." - Patrick RothfussWe were bound to get each other wrong before we got each other right. I know, in the end, you'll come for me. All that matters to me now is how long you'll hesitate before you pull the trigger.





	1. on a cobweb afternoon

**Author's Note:**

> hello and welcome to my own personal test to see whether or not I can finish a multi-chaptered fic. I'm writing this 100% for me and anyone who shows even the slightest interest in it holds an eternal place in my heart.

_in a room full of emptiness_

Sawyer tried her best to make sense of the black letters that had begun to fuzz and swim before her, eyelids growing dangerously heavy as she scanned the pages of the book propped up against her knees. The pillow beneath her neck was no help at all, the scent of mothballs and laundry soap lulling her into an all too welcome state of drowsiness.

She hadn’t slept in days — others would have called it trauma, but she knew it was something else, something blue-eyed and serpent-tongued that filled her lungs with water and her head with fog.

A loud crack of static jarred Sawyer from her thoughts like a shotgun slug to the chest, delaying the onset of whatever unrestful state she had been close to entering. Her eyes darted towards the wooden desk in the middle of the room where her radio sat upright between a barely-used ash tray and a half-empty bottle of whiskey, its red light stuttering angrily for a brief second before dimming.

With an annoyed groan, she snapped her book shut and sat up, swinging her legs to the side of the bed. It was probably Grace calling to see if she was hungry — Mary May would have come upstairs and knocked.

The radio emitted yet another crackle as soon as she snatched it off the table, jamming the large, square button on its side with her thumb.

“What?” she said, barely hiding the exhausted tone in her voice before releasing the button. She turned and hopped up onto the desk, planting both feet onto the matching chair in front of it while she awaited a reply.

“Evening, Deputy,” drawled John Seed in response, his voice thick and honeyed despite the static and bringing Sawyer to her senses faster than a cold shower.

Sawyer felt the muscles in her shoulders tense, unsure if the sound of his voice was a welcome surprise or not. Her gaze flitted to the map of Hope County she had hung on her wall and decorated with thumbtacks, scribbles, and photos of each member of the Seed family. Three were untarnished, new-looking, but one — John’s — had been riddled with puncture marks, the throwing knife she had used for target practice still lodged directly between his eyes.

Unwelcome it was, then.

She sighed, exhaling slowly through her nose before raising the radio clutched in her hand and repeating with as much disdain as she could muster, “What?”

“It’s just you and me, Deputy,” John chuckled in response. “There’s no need to pretend to feel so — contemptuous.”

Sawyer frowned, eyes narrowed at the photo on the wall and feeling very much like she was about to fall into a trap. “What makes you think I’m pretending?”

“Because of your sin, obviously,” John explained with an edge to his voice that Sawyer couldn’t quite decipher. “You’re Sloth — _acedia_. Why else would you be wasting time sitting alone in your room instead of doing something productive, like rescuing your friend?”

“How do you know what I’m doing?” Sawyer replied, glancing sideways at the windows she had asked Mary May to keep boarded up for her.

“Just a guess,” was John’s answer. “Was I right?”

Sawyer rolled her tongue against the inside of her cheek, glaring upwards past the photo of John on her wall and landing on a large, handwritten note pinned to the corner of one of her maps - RESCUE JOEY HUDSON.

She had gone over the letters twice with a marker, as if making the ink darker and bolder would cement it with more urgency in her brain. After all, Joey had been the only other woman with her, had even offered her words of comfort just before their attempted arrest of Joseph Seed — that was a bond, right?

Sawyer wasn’t sure, and a voice in the back of her head had been screaming at her for almost a month to care more but, as loud as that voice could be, she had yet to show she was entertaining it more than she’d entertain a door-to-door salesman.

“Did I lose you, Deputy? Sawyer?”

She drew her attention back to the radio — hearing him refer to her by her first name felt strange and overly familiar, like a hand placed on her shoulder by someone she had just met.

Throughout her life, Sawyer had relied on others to tell her precisely where on the spectrum of human emotion she should be landing. From years of observation, she had learned how to read a room, decipher body language, and pass judgment without bias, which had made her an excellent cop, but hadn’t helped her feel more human.

In truth, she could list all the things she cared about on one hand with multiple fingers to spare and something about being called out on her lack of empathy by a herald of a religious murder-cult left a bad taste in her mouth.

“What exactly do you want?” Sawyer grumbled, hopping off of the desk and moving towards what remained of John’s photo to retrieve her knife.

“I want a lot of things, Deputy, but I know you’re not ready to give any of them to me.”

There was a short pause and Sawyer swore she heard the beginning of a sigh before the transmission cut off. When her radio sputtered to life again, John’s voice sounded strained, almost heavy, as if he hadn’t used it in a while.

“I want to talk,” he said. “Face to face, one on one, no games. I haven’t been fair — to you.”

“That’s an understatement,” Sawyer replied mutely, wrapping her fingers around the hilt of her knife and dislodging it from the wall with a soft grunt.

“No, it’s compassion,” John asserted sharply. “If we consider Fall’s End, the silos, and the rapidly increasing tally of my men you’ve murdered, I have been more than fair to you. Putting that aside and offering the opportunity for us to level with each other — that’s compassion.”

“Would we also be putting aside the fact you tried to drown me?” Sawyer glanced down at her free hand as she flipped the knife over in it, catching it by the flat side of its pointed blade. There was another pause on the other end of the line that she imagined was covering up an exasperated sigh.

“I’ll be at my ranch tomorrow morning,” John instructed. “Come armed if you want but know that I won’t be and that we’ll be alone.”

Sawyer flipped her knife over again and caught it by the hilt, chewing the inside of her bottom lip in thought. “Will I be meeting with the Baptist or with John Seed?”

She waited for a response, taking a few steps backwards and poising the blade in her hand toward his photo on the wall — ten seconds, fifteen seconds.

“John Seed.”

Sawyer nodded, pocketing the radio and loosing the knife between her fingers in one swift motion that would have appeared calculated had it not missed its mark by two inches to the left. She stared at it, at the lacerated photo on the wall, wondering whether or not the feeling in her gut was disappointment or apprehension.

Rather than dwell on it, however, she grabbed her jacked off the back of her chair and headed downstairs.

*

The Spread Eagle had already been filled with its usual suspects by the time Sawyer parked herself at the corner barstool. Mary May was ready with a freshly-opened bottle of beer, which she slid across the counter as Grace pulled up the seat beside her.

They had hovered over her like hawks ever since the night John captured her and Sawyer hadn’t been entirely sure why — she thought that night had been considered a victory. In any case, she didn’t find herself bothered, though she was running out of ways to tell them she was fine.

“How’d you sleep last night?” Grace asked, her voice as low and soothing as ever. She had been Sawyer’s favorite accomplice in the field since the day they met due to do her ability to remain calm in any given situation. Sometimes she could be a bit of a downer, but they had developed an understanding, speaking to each other with gestures and eye contact, a trait both of them seemed to appreciate equally.

“Not great,” Sawyer answered honestly, noting the concern in Grace’s eyes as she took a swig of her beer. “Stop.”

“You need me to smack the barrel of my rifle into the back of your head, boss, you let me know,” Grace offered with a small smile.

“I may take you up on that.”

Silence fell between them, which wasn’t abnormal by any means, except that Sawyer was fidgeting, twisting a ring she wore on her thumb as she stared blankly at the television screen behind the bar. She quickly realized what she had been doing and hoped Grace hadn’t seen, but of course, she had.

“Something on your mind?” the markswoman asked.

Sawyer kept her eyes glued to the television screen, only mildly aware of what sports program was displayed on it. “I’m going to do something a lot of people aren’t going to like.”

Grace shifted in her seat. “Then why do it?”

“Because I want to.”

Sawyer heard the other woman let go of a short sigh, saw her rub her temples and take a sip of her own drink.

“Is it dangerous?” Grace asked.

“Probably.”

“Could it jeopardize the resistance?”

She thought that one over in her head for a moment. Dying tomorrow would absolutely put a dent in the small bit of progress they had made in Holland Valley but, and maybe it was wishful thinking, she wasn’t wholly convinced she was walking into trap.

“Maybe,” she stated simply.

“Do you care?”

Sawyer glanced sideways at her friend.

“No.”


	2. by a freeway I confess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John knew all too well that survival was a basic human instinct — even when the mind was not set on it, the body fought back. A hand placed in a fireplace would always pull back and a breath held too long would always be let go.
> 
> Perhaps he hadn’t held her under water long enough, or perhaps, for some reason, she didn’t think he’d actually kill her. Perhaps he’d ask her — if she ever showed up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh my god this took too long to write but I did it. I kind of had an extremely hellish week that took a bit to pull out of, but I'm here and I'm back, LET'S DO THIS.

_I was lost in the pages  
of a book full of death_

John was no stranger to the void — the hollow feeling one gets in their gut that aches and churns like insatiable hunger. He found himself wishing he could feel it more often — feel it now — as he stared listlessly at the small red bulb on the ugly beige landline he kept on the dining table. Its angry strobing had finally ceased, taking Joseph’s voice and the decent mood he had entertained that morning along with it.

His eyes fluttered shut as he breathed in deep, urging the weight in his chest to quit the incessant pounding in his ribcage and the throbbing in his ears — he hated it.

Exhaling slowly, John struggled to push the message his brother had left him out of his head — it had been nothing but the same speech that had suffocated him for years and he had to remind himself that Joseph had good intentions, even if they did nothing but nudge away whatever clarity he had been close to grasping. He could unpack those good intentions later.

As he rummaged through the asylum of his brain, a new voice — her voice — begun to suffuse his thoughts. It took a bit of reeling — he hadn’t heard it in almost twelve hours — but when he found it at the end of his breath, he allowed it to twist itself around him, inky and black, like a spiderweb of swirling thread that grazed his wrists and blossomed halo-like around her head as he plunged her, fingers clasped around her neck, back down into the waters of the—

No.

John shook his head vigorously, pressing his palms to his temples as he reopened his eyes and swallowed hard, squinting against the onset of light that greeted him as if he had just awoken. The phone was still nondescript and unsightly — good. The books were still on the bookshelves — good. The orange pillows were still on the sofa — good. The two cups of coffee he had purchased were still on the table in front of him — good.

He felt the tension he had built up in his shoulders begin to ease and chuckled to himself.

_You have to love them, John. Do not let your sin prevent that._

He wouldn’t — not this time.

John reached up a hand to smooth out his dark hair, perfectly styled, before checking his watch. It was nearing eight-thirty and, in the sinister, bleaker corner of his mind, he began to wonder if she wouldn’t show.

No.

She would show, he told himself. She wasn’t like that. Admittedly, he hadn’t the slightest idea what Sawyer Leigh was like, having only spoken to her in person once, just moments before attempting to absolve her of her sin — drown her in her penance as her nails dug into the skin of his forearm. He remembered a curious lack of desperation in her eyes that had given him pause, or would have, had Joseph not interrupted.

He still clung to it — the look in her eyes. They say a person reveals who they truly are moments before they die as their life flashes before them, if such a thing even happened. John had performed the cleansing countless times over the years and though not all the sheep he herded had made it into his flock, the ones that didn’t always had one thing in common — they wanted to.

To be part of the flock? Maybe.

To be pulled out of the water? Absolutely.

John knew all too well that survival was a basic human instinct — even when the mind was not set on it, the body fought back. A hand placed in a fireplace would always pull back and a breath held too long would always be let go.

Perhaps he hadn’t held her under water long enough, or perhaps, for some reason, she didn’t think he’d actually kill her. Perhaps he’d ask her — if she ever showed up.

John sighed, leaning back in his chair, acutely aware that he couldn’t remember when he decided to sit down. He reached out to check the side of one of the coffee cups in front of him with the back of his hand. It was still hot — good. He only hoped the gesture wasn’t too grand, or worse, foolish.

He had woken up early that morning, boarded his plane and flown to the outskirts of the closest city before strolling into the first commercial coffee shop he could find and ordering two lattes. The shop had just opened but was already playing host to a handful of patrons. Most of them didn’t bother to notice when he walked in, though a few of them stole glances — his tattoos, he figured. There weren’t a lot of people with the word “sloth” emblazoned across their chest beneath loosely buttoned shirts, and there were even less who’d unabashedly adorn a tattoo that was more scar tissue than ink.

The barista at the counter hadn’t been shy about asking him what it meant — she was young and doe-eyed with light brown hair tied into a neat ponytail at the back of her head. Had John not been there for a very specific reason, he might have flirted with her, but he only had room for one fixation at a time.

Maybe, one day, he'd come back to the shop to tell her how he gave it to himself, hands stained with blood and shaking, not with apprehension, but with fury, white hot and bursting. He could tell her how the smell of burnt flesh stung his nostrils and filled his lungs, threatening to sear his throat with bile as he glanced at the remains of a boy just shy of eighteen, a new sheep in his flock, lying mere feet from where he stood.

He remembered the sound the boy’s flesh made as he ripped it clean from the red sinew of his muscles, the way the heated knife had sunk easily into his eyes, wide and frightened, as he reduced them to pools of crimson black pulp. Would she be interested, he wondered, in the clarity it had brought him? Would she know that that feeling was his God?

Maybe. One day. Not today.

“I’m lazy,” he told her instead in John Duncan’s voice with John Duncan’s smile. “Hence the coffee.”

It had been a stupid answer, but it hadn’t entirely been a lie.

Thankfully, he didn’t have long to dwell on it before three sharp knocks jostled him from his thoughts and pulled him back into the present. The phone was still there — good. The pillows were still orange — good. The coffee was still hot — good.

He checked his watch — eight forty-seven.

To John’s surprise, he felt heavy as he stood up from his seat, keenly aware of his own heartbeat as he affixed his gaze on the front door.

_Will I be meeting with The Baptist or with John Seed?_

She would be meeting with John Seed and he quickly realized he had everything and nothing prepared. The Baptist had invited her over and John Duncan had bought her coffee but John Seed was a worn leather tome he kept in the back of his closet, only read from when he was alone. For someone who wore so many masks, he found it absurd how unpracticed he was at taking them off.

Another set of knocks, more impatient than the first, spurred him towards the door. Its metal handle felt smooth against his fingertips, still cold with morning air as he pulled it open — no deep breaths here. Don’t suffocate, John.

She had shown up.

Sawyer gazed up at him from where she stood on the doorstep, eyes hidden behind a pair of teashade sunglasses, dark hair pooling at her shoulders and only slightly obscuring a faded, yellowing bruise around her neck that made the inner corners of John’s eyebrows twitch.

“ _Hi_ ,” he breathed, sounding more relieved than enthusiastic. Sawyer raised an eyebrow at him.

“Hi,” she replied flatly, a tone in her voice that he’d have pegged for disinterest had this been the first time they’d spoken.

“Are you armed?” John watched as she removed her sunglasses and tucked them away into the pocket of her leather jacket, revealing a pair of brown eyes and an expression that could have come off as bored had she not been tonguing the inside of her cheek, brow set.

It struck him that he was having trouble reading her — and that fascinated him.

“No,” Sawyer answered before gesturing ambiguously behind her. “But she is.”

John tilted his head up slightly to look past her, squinting into the distance but seeing no one.

“You won’t find her,” the deputy continued, unfazed as she lifted a thin finger and rested it lightly on his chest — her touch was cool and it tingled his skin. “But she can see you.”

He looked down — a bright red dot hovered just above the jagged “o” he had carved into his sternum. His face fell and the sinking feeling he felt in his gut was disappointment, though he couldn’t decide if it was because she didn’t trust him or because he had expected her to.

“Oh, man, your face,” he heard her say softly, lifting his head in time to note the flash of a wry smirk tugging at the corners of her lips — was she teasing him? "Grace is leaving. She didn’t believe me when I told her you weren’t going to try to kill me again.”

“Not today, at least,” John kidded. The chuckle he had primed to accompany his retort got stuck halfway in his throat and he grimaced instead. “That was supposed to be a joke.”

Sawyer took half a step back, folding her arms across her chest and tilting her head. Her eyes were narrowed but it was her mouth John found himself staring at as her teeth caught the corner of her bottom lip in thought. It dawned on him that he was being examined and it made him feel too aware of himself — he wasn’t sure he liked it.

John sighed heavily, suddenly feeling very frustrated with not knowing what to say or how to act. After spending almost a whole lifetime knowing how and who he was supposed to be for the rest of the world, he struggled to pin down just how to be himself for her.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this is— hard. For me.”

“What, being a normal human being?” Sawyer replied dryly. To his surprise, her features softened and she offered him a small shrug as if to say, 'I get that.'

“Can we start over?” He moved away from the door frame, holding it open with one hand as he gestured inside with the other. “Why don’t you come in?”

"Is that coffee?” Sawyer asked in wide-eyed disbelief as she brushed past him through the door and into the lodge. “Eden’s Gate has a Starbucks? Is it poisoned?”

John offered her a cautious smile, shutting the door behind him as he watched her gingerly pick up one of the cups on the table. “I didn’t get it in Hope County and only yours is poisoned.”

"I believe it," she replied, taking a sip without hesitation before letting her gaze wander about the room. As Sawyer observed his belongings, John took a moment to consider his present company, feeling conflicted and not entirely at ease.

She didn't give him time to unpack the thought before she spoke again.

"Alright, John Seed. What do you want?"

**Author's Note:**

> for the curious: this fic will be alternating between both sawyer's and john's povs. the entire thing is outlined, chronicles the holland valley portion of the game, and will conclude after 8 chapters (unless some kind of crazy, unexpected light bulb goes off in my brain that extends it another chapter or two). I'm going to be touching on a lot of material related to personality disorders so if you have any feedback related to how certain characters are depicted/described, please do not hesitate to shoot me a message here or on my tumblr: http://christevans.tumblr.com
> 
> thank you so much for reading! <3 no pressure, but comments really keep me going.


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